By Michael T Nietzel
Eight university teams have been announced as finalists for the Laude Institute’s Moonshots, a research competition that poses this big question: how can the world’s leading computer scientists use AI to solve humanity’s hardest problems.
Each of the eight teams is receiving a $250,000 seed grant, which it will use to present a fully developed proposal later this year to a selection committee that will choose which project will be awarded a $10 million grant to establish a three-to-five-year Moonshot lab.
The eight finalists are:
- A University of Chicago team that will develop AI-based weather forecasting technology to help farmers around the world make better-informed agricultural and public health decisions.
- A Cornell University group that plans to use artificial intelligence to establish more trustworthy AI-mediated communication across online platforms.
- UCLA, where a multidisciplinary team will work to develop an AI system capable of thinking and reasoning like a skilled mathematician.
- Carnegie Mellon University’s ARISTOS (ARtificial Intelligence for Successful Teaching Of Skills) project, a re-skilling effort that will focus on helping people acquire physical skills more easily and affordably.
- Stanford University, where researchers will attempt to develop a digital model that can simulate how an embryo evolves, identify where things go wrong, and lead to better targeted interventions for congenital diseases.
- Another Stanford team that will develop tools to measure how AI is changing work across industry sectors, creating simulated environments where humans and AI systems collaborate, and tracking economic ripple effects in real time.
- Edge Medicine, a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley, that will develop an open-source infrastructure that integrates data from electronic health records and wearable biosensors into a continuous health management system.
- A collaboration between Harvard University and MIT that aims to build on an existing open-source video deliberation platform to enable millions of people across the nation to participate in meaningful civic conversations.
The Moonshots competition received 125 proposals from more than 600 researchers at 47 institutions. The selection committee was chaired by Turing Award winner David Patterson (Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley), and also included Nobel laureate John Jumper, Turing Award winner John Hennessy (former president of Stanford University), Jeff Dean (Google Chief Scientist), Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer), along with others.